you were in the darkness too
by quintilis
Summary: You left me in the dark. Then I heard your heart beating. Completed. AxC
1. Chapter 1

**Category**: Gundam SEED

**Disclaimer**: I don't own it.

**Notes**: I'm trying a new style of writing, inspired by a very old story by Rashaka. I really enjoyed the experience. It'll become easier to follow as you progress, but if it helps, each dialogue-only section alternates Cagalli or Athrun speaking the first line. The first section starts with Cagalli.

This is a two-part story. The second chapter, yet to be written, will be a short follow-up. Please, please review to let me know what you thought, or how you would like to see the story end.

* * *

"Is this a dream?"

"I think so."

"Well, then, what are you doing in my dream?"

"It's not your dream, it's mine."

"How do you know?"

"Because you're always in my dreams."

* * *

"Is this really how it was when you signed the treaty with the Atlantic Federation? These nobles continuously hovering over you like vultures?"

"Are you saying that I was the prey? No. The decision was mine."

"Coerced, as it was."

"I was alone."

"Your father's legacy was always there to guide you."

"You left me alone."

"You never told me you needed me."

* * *

"Is that your mother with you outside? She is beautiful. Why did she marry your father?"

"The usual reason, I suppose. Love."

"Hm."

"He wasn't always like that. Look, here he is fixing my mechanical helicopter."

"He reminds me a lot of you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That he is intelligent and charismatic. Misguided, though."

"I know who I am."

"I'm not sure that's true, Athrun."

* * *

"Every minute of every day that I stay here I feel trapped. I keep thinking, if only I could have the power. If only I could somehow have the power, to change how things are. To make a difference."

Cagalli freezes. The disappointment courses through her veins like ice. _You can make a difference if you stay. If you stay here with me. _She buries the consideration deep within her heart. "So that's it, then? You're leaving Orb? Again?"

The last word hangs in the air. "I'm not useful here. I don't belong here."

"All right." She holds her head high. Her hands tremble.

Two years later, she meets him again. In a dream.

* * *

"I don't like the way he is touching you."

"You don't have the right to say things like that anymore."

"Don't laugh. I'm serious."

"Does it bother you? That I wear the jewelry he's gifted me? How his voice gets low when he speaks to me? How his fingers brush my neck when we're alone?"

Cuttingly, "And yet it's me who you dream of at night."

"When he looks at me, he's not looking beyond me at something greater. He sees me for me. It's all I've ever wanted."

"I know you. Understand you, intimately."

"You don't know yourself well enough to be able to know others."

"Do you hate me?"

"I can't hate you. You're just a piece of my dream."

"Truthfully. Do you hate me?"

"Sometimes, so much that I think I'll burn with the intensity of it. But then I just feel sorry for you. Running in circles. I'm happy in my life."

* * *

"Is everything that you dream a nightmare?"

Around them, a world of blackened metal wreckage and mangled bodies. "This is real. It was."

"Let's go back. The war is over."

"In my heart, the war is not over. It will never end. I'm the one who chose to fight. Even if that brought consequences that I didn't wish for, I can't escape from the truth. I can't atone for it."

"It must be terrible for you. Frightening."

"Often."

A sigh, sad.

"I think of my country, every day. It's the only reason I wake up each morning."

"Same for me."

"You don't understand. You have your brother. And your people love you."

"You're alone, truly."

"But this is my home. This is the life I've chosen."

"Oh, Athrun."

* * *

"I get so angry sometimes, at the way that I've turned out. Distrustful, restless. Isolated. I'm all sharp edges. I hate myself more for realizing it."

"You could change all that, if you wanted to."

"No. I'm a soldier, by birth and by blood. It's burned into my skin and I feel as though I can never escape it. Do you know, I take a different route home every week to hide my trail? It's a terrible, obsessive habit. One of many."

"You're always so hard on yourself. I can't stand it, I can't."

"I think if there hadn't been a war, I would never have stepped foot in a cockpit. I'm not strong like you, Cagalli. I never wanted glory or heroics. Only…only my family."

"You can't talk like this. You saved my life. You saved me. If it weren't for you, I don't know what I would have done after the First Bloody Valentine."

"And you. I've wanted you."

"You had me. I was yours."

* * *

"Saito's not like anyone that I've ever met. It's different, how little he knows about politics. He cares so little, even though his father and grandfather were both councilors. He's an intellectual, a professor of anthropology."

"With a very historic and esteemed surname," Athrun says cruelly. "And he's years older than you."

"He is good to me. Orb likes him. Kira likes him."

"I don't."

"This weekend, he's taking me to his family's estate in the east. I think he's going to propose marriage."

"Stop telling me about your goings-on with another man. I don't want to hear it."

"Then listen to this: It's been six years since the end of the war. Four since you left me. I'm entitled to move on with my life."

"If you'd only-"

"Don't expect me to wait for you. You and I have been doomed from the start."

"That doesn't make any sense. I don't believe you."

"Listen to me, Athrun. At the beginning, it's always beautiful. Golden. I love the way you look at me then…like anything's possible when we're together. But then I watch that look decay. I can only hold your attention for so long. You move away, farther and farther from me. And everything falls apart."

"Where is this speech coming from? You'd never say this to me in person."

"It's too painfully true."

"What will you say when Saito proposes?"

"Yes."

* * *

Cagalli looks at the antique ring in Saito's outstretched palm. His grandmother's, he'd said, a gold band with a large blue sapphire and a number of smaller diamonds inlaid around the edge. It is a gorgeous piece of craftsmanship.

Cagalli glances at Saito. It is true he doesn't know much about her world or what she's been through. But he is kind, and passionate about what he does. She is sure he would be a loyal husband. _And a generous father._

Maybe if she looks at him in the right light – if she concentrates hard enough – the warm brown of his eyes can turn to a brilliant green. Maybe someday.

"Yes."

* * *

"I saw you today. Your hair's gotten longer. It's past your shoulders, now. You had a beautiful pin in it."

"That's right."

"It matched your engagement ring. Why didn't you say anything to me?"

"I didn't know you were there. We attended different segments of the conference."

"You were afraid to talk to me because then we might have to acknowledge what this is."

"None of this is real."

"But this is my dream. You're always in my dreams."

"You think we're both actually here."

"If you'd talked to me, we would have known."

"I don't think I could have faced you."

"Hm."

"No, this isn't real. It doesn't mean anything."

* * *

Cagalli sees him more and more often in her dreams. They speak openly, because none of it matters anymore.

* * *

I saw the sunset today and I thought of you, Athrun.

* * *

Kira hasn't talked to me in years.

* * *

I think Orb is on the path of improvement, at last.

* * *

I remembered us when we were seventeen. It might have been the last time I laughed.

* * *

Sometimes I wake up and I want to believe you're next to me.

* * *

I won my re-election to my seat on the Supreme Council. I wish I hadn't.

* * *

I have these fantasies that one day we'll both stop being important figures and we can drop everything and run away together.

* * *

I'm scared that I might become my father.

* * *

I ended my engagement.

* * *

I believe that thoughts can overcome time and distance. That you can hear me.

* * *

Sometimes I wish this were real.

* * *

I'm coming to Orb. I'll wait for you.

* * *

I miss you.

* * *

I love you.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes:** I highly, highly, _highly_ recommend that you go back and read chapter one again. There are a lot of references to it here in this closing chapter, and I think you will appreciate _you were in the darkness too_ a hundredfold more if you remember what was established previously. See you when you get back!

And thank you all for reading—feedback is as always greatly appreciated. Pleeeeease review!

* * *

The day he arrives, there is no storm or rain, neither does the sun shine brightly. There is a cool breeze off the water. The sky is a calm color that makes her daydream about leaping to hold the edges of the clouds, to dangle and to travel with them to distant places where the lines of the sky and the sea merge.

She finds him standing in front of her father's memorial. There are no words as she steps past him, kneels to place the arrangement of lilies and white gladioli at the base of the monument. The flowers blend into the stark colorlessness of the setting, the pure white of the marble and stone that drains the pavilion of both soul and spirit. Only in the distance is there relief, in the blueness of the ocean. It calls of redemption.

After a long silence, Athrun says to her back, "I told you I was coming to Orb."

"I know." She is standing in front of him and doesn't twist to meet his eyes. _I ended my engagement._ "I haven't been waiting." When he doesn't respond, she continues, voice forgiving. "And? Is this reunion all that you had hoped it would be?"

Here, alone with the two of them, Athrun feels the surroundings pressing inward. Strangely, the blank whiteness seems blinding. Painful to the senses. "No."

"Had enough of building castles in the air, then? _I_ told _you_, we have been doomed from the start."

"My dreams are too lowly to be castles in the air. I'd only hoped to see your face. Maybe hear you say my name. If I was lucky."

She finally turns, expression unreadable. "Athrun."

A breath, a skipped heartbeat as his name falls from her lips, heavy. _I believe that thoughts can overcome time and distance. That you can hear me. _"Cagalli."

"Is this meeting enough to tide you until we see each other next? For another four, five years?" Even as she speaks, she comes closer, one hand rubbing the other arm.

"I need to hear you say it to me. I'll never believe it until you do."

She catches his meaning—it's painted all over his face. The emotion is too raw, to open to meet directly. She turns away and presses her palms to the white railing. A faraway ocean wind whips her hair around her shoulders. "The truth is this. The man that I knew before the second war never came back. But when I think about it, I wonder if maybe he's still out there, somewhere. On the other side of this road or just beyond this water, or maybe somewhere I can't reach at all. I used to think that perhaps someday, when his country no longer needed him, I'd see him again."

Athrun's mouth has gone dry. He opens it, but no sound forms.

Cagalli raises her head to stare at the sky. _Sometimes I wake up and I want to believe you're next to me._ "I meant it when I said that you had me. I was yours. I knew who you were and we understood each other. It's different now, because I'm not the only one with obligations. Now I'm sure, even if one day your country doesn't need you, the day won't come when you no longer need your people."

"It doesn't have to be one or the other: country or self. Not for me and not for you either."

"Do you think so?" The question lacks any sharp edges. "In these years I've come to learn that public duty and personal desire are usually mutually exclusive."

"Sometimes," he comes to stand beside her at the railing, "they are. And then one day they aren't."

Cagalli allows Athrun to take her hand and rub his thumb over the pressure point at her wrist. It's an easy, familiar touch that makes her shiver from the top of her head straight to her toes. "Is today that that day?" she asks, words nearly carried away in the breeze toward the distant tide.

"…No." Unexpectedly, Athrun leans down to press a firm, warm kiss to her mouth. He tastes like longing and impossibility. For a second she can't think clearly. He pulls away, but only enough so he can speak, thumb still lingering at her wrist. "Things are going to change very soon. But I want you to know that it won't make any difference to me. I will still choose you. I will always choose you."

He steps back. Cagalli grips the railing to stabilize herself from the sudden lack of support, from the aftershock of his kiss, so intimate and distant at once. In a moment, he has turned away.

Stop, she wants to call out to his retreating figure, what do you mean?

But he is already out of her reach, his dark form a shadow on the blank white palette of the pavilion. Something in her chest prickles. Behind her, the sea is a hum and the wind picks up to a dull roar.

Cagalli receives the news days later, on a crisp morning when the early-spring sunlight bathes her office in a cool glow. From the outside, she appears ever the same—crisp, slightly detached—but her left temple begins to pound with a sudden headache.

Athrun has been named the Chair of the PLANT Supreme Council after the mid-term retirement of Chairwoman Brevard.

Cagalli thinks back to his enigmatic comments at the memorial, "It won't make any difference to me. I will always choose you." She remembers the words, his and hers both, shared between them in a place that she secrets at the far bottom of her soul. _Sometimes I wish this were real_.

That night is different. She finds that her dreams have stopped—it takes another year for them to return to her, twelve months spent fruitlessly grasping at something undefinable that slips like sand through her fingers. The first dream is like a drop of water on the tongue after eons trapped in the desert.

* * *

From the depths of her dream she hears footsteps. They are distant and faint but she would recognize them anywhere, their rhythm imprinted permanently onto the shadow of her heart._ When we are drowning in noise, I will stop to find your voice. I know that somehow I will find my way back._

She shoots into the darkness of the dreamscape, letting her ears guide her. She follows the press of his feet on the street of this abandoned city, coming faster and louder, the press becoming a pound as his walk becomes a run, then a sprint. She chases the sounds until all she senses is his heartbeat shooting through her nerves to the tips of her being. Until all she hears is his breath and his voice as it brushes her ear, telling her in ardent tones exactly the words she wants to hear.


End file.
